In Queens, a Drive-In for the Car-Free Set

Artist Ankeen McGuire checks out the progress of the marquee sign at the Empire Drive-In.

There is an oft-overlooked drawback to being a city of subways, buses, taxis and Citi Bikes: Car-free New Yorkers miss out on that suburban experience of the drive-in movie.

For a few weeks, though, that will change, when a parking lot in Queen is transformed into an open-air theater that brings a touch of small-town quaintness to Flushing Meadows.

Empire Drive-In—a pop-up theater developed by Todd Chandler, a 39-year-old filmmaker and musician, and Jeff Stark, the 41-year-old curator of an email cultural listing—will feature films from Friday night until Oct. 20.

Adrienne Grunwald for The Wall Street Journal

Signs in the snack stand at the Empire Drive-In.

A team of laborers built a concession stand, a marquee and a 24- by 40-foot screen in the parking lot of the New York Hall of Science. They also salvaged about 60 junkyard cars from Brooklyn’s Canarsie neighborhood and wired them with radios that will play sound from the films.

The flicks scheduled for showings include a mix of silver-screen classics (including a Charlie Chaplin film with a live orchestra), animated films and B-movie kitsch (a low-budget film called “Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine,” for example). There are also earnest short films and provocative documentaries, including one about mechanics in Willets Point.

The duo behind the setup has done similar installations in San Jose, Calif., in 2010 and in Manchester, England, in 2012.

The peak for New York state’s drive-in scene was in 1963, when about 150 screens dotted the state, according to Driveinmovie.com. That is down to about 30 today, with one of the closest to the city some 50 miles away in Warwick, in Orange County.

But in New York City, where meeting adults who have never had a driver’s license is commonplace, something strange happened. “People said, ‘Oh I get it,’” said Mr. Stark, “‘you’re making a drive-in so people who don’t have cars can see movies that way.’”

The cars themselves are junk, many missing wheels or windshields, or suffering impacted roofs. But Mr. Chandler noted one of his goals wasn’t merely to stoke nostalgia, but also “to interrupt the waste stream.”

The cars include a yellow cab, a boat-tail Buick Riviera from the early 1970s, a BMW, minivans, full vans, station wagons and more Ford Tauruses than seen outside a ‘90s PTA meeting.

The drive-in team has cleaned up the cars, as much as junk can be cleaned. But it left many of the knickknacks within, including an empty bottle of whiskey and a handwritten divorce letter in a Chevrolet Caprice with 22-inch rims. Eight pine-tree-shaped air fresheners and a miniature ten-gallon hat dangling from the rearview mirror of a Mercedes SUV.

“Wherever we can cram in more layers to the experience, we want to,” said Mr. Chandler, as a No. 7 train roared past the parking lot.